Adding Team Members and Sending Messages

Team members are the users who will assist in the creation of the contract.

Project team consists of Project Groups. Each project group has different roles, which specify the permissions for the users in that group such as:

• Ownership
• Visibility
• Editing Capabilities
• Review and Approval

A project team consists of project groups. Each project group has different roles, which specify the permissions for the users in that group. The permissions specify the objects the users can access and what actions the users can perform in that project.

Creating groups with different roles enables you to assign users to the project team with different roles and capabilities. Membership in a project group allows users to perform certain tasks at a project level, not a global level. If you want to give a large group of people access to a project, set the access control rather than adding them as team members. Add people as team members if you have a small group of people who need to receive notifications and participate in the project.

Generally, SAP Ariba Contracts templates will be set up with all the necessary project groups. Some project groups may have some members already assigned. Most of the time, contract workspace owners will not have to create new project groups, but they will need to assign members to the existing project groups.

Area of the workspace to communicate with others about the contract.

• Messages can be assigned alerts and labels for grouping/sorting
• Each Contract Workspace message board is automatically assigned an unique and random email address
  • Allows you to email messages to people who are not CW users
  • Supplier auditing; captures who said ‘what’ and ‘when’

In addition to communicating with others involved in the contract through tasks, you may also send messages via the Message Board. Messages can be created in two ways:

• Click New Topic to initiate a message that will appear on the message board. All team members will be able to view this message. You can include an attachment, such as a document or .zip file.
• Initiate an email by clicking Post via Email. The system will open your email application so you can send an email to the recipient(s). The contract workspace will automatically be cc’d (copied) on the email. This causes the email message and any attachments to be stored on the Message Board within your contract workspace. This method of messaging allows you to communicate about the contract with people who are not users of SAP Ariba Contracts (meaning people who do not have a username and password to log into SAP Ariba Contracts). If those people reply all to the email message, their response will be added to the Message Board. If they also include documents as an attachment to the email, team members can add these documents to the Documents tab of the workspace with a single click from the Message Board. Regardless of the method selected to create the message, all messages and their replies are stored on the Message Board.

You and your team can see all communications about the contract, including emails to or from people who are not users of SAP Ariba Contracts. In other words, the message board shows who said what when, capturing any important information about the contract that may not be within the actual contract itself. Messages are threaded by Title. In the case of an email message, this is the email’s subject line. Replies to a message with the same title will appear in the same thread.

You can group messages of different threads together by custom labels that you create within each workspace. For example, for a particular contract workspace you may create labels called Warranty, Scope, and Schedule and assign each of these labels to specific threads on your Message Board. Then you can sort and search the messages based on these labels. This is an optional feature to help you organize numerous messages. By default, the system always includes the label of Announcement. Any message assigned this label will appear in the Announcements section of the workspace Overview section. If the contract is also a watched project, the announcements will also appear in the Announcements content item of each team member’s dashboard.